A Moorish Bath

This Moorish Bath (Un bain maure, ébauche) is an oil sketch on canvas, 70.5 × 54 cm, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted in the 1870s as a study for his finished composition Un bain maure, femme turque au bain; it was sold from the Ann and Gordon Getty collection at Christie's New York in 2022.

Gérôme's first bathhouse scene, the Moorish Bath of 1870 now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, followed his 1868 trip to Egypt, and over the next two decades he returned to the theme repeatedly. He drew on photographs by the Abdullah Frères studio and on sketches made in the baths of Constantinople and Bursa during his travels, but the women in his finished pictures were models posing in his Paris studio. For this composition Christie's records at least four studies in pencil and oil; the finished painting, 81.5 × 65.5 cm and signed lower left, is in a private collection, and a related Moorish Bath of about 1874–77 belongs to the RISD Museum in Providence.

The sketch shows the bather in a private bath, leaning on a stone basin and glancing back, while a crouching attendant in blue prepares the last stage of the bath, a palm-oil scrub. It also shows how an academic painting was built up in stages: pencil underdrawing is still visible in the attendant's hands, the background and attendant remain at the thinly glazed ébauche stage, and only the nude has been worked to a smooth finish. Shafts of light falling across the model, the wall and the floor recur in Gérôme's bath scenes. In the finished work he changed her pose so that her face angles down toward the basin rather than slightly upward.

The sketch passed through a Paris sale at the Hôtel Drouot in 1977, the Maurice Sternberg galleries in Chicago, a Christie's London sale in 1979 and the London collection of Donald M. Munson before Ann and Gordon Getty bought it in 1995. On 21 October 2022 it fetched 252,000 US dollars, below its estimate of 400,000–600,000. Emily M. Weeks has authenticated it for her revision of Gérôme's catalogue raisonné.